My mom liked The Monkees but they completely missed all the cool music so I didn’t inherit any of that. My parents were young during the 60s, but none of the music that was going on in the 60s intruded into their lives. I could not have been more of a show tune kid. MTT Were there other musical influences? Rock, pop, jazz? I was really cribbing Andrew Lloyd Webber and whoever I happened to be loving at the time. It was always melodies that felt like theater, they’re theater songs, they’re just lacking the words.
So even if I was writing a song, it would be a song for the musical version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. All of them were always in a theatrical context. As soon as I started becoming a really good piano player by ear, I started making up tunes and songs. That was the thing that made my piano playing and musicianship take off.
I started playing piano while thinking about it in a theatrical context. I would see shows and come home and pick out the melody. But then when I was in fourth or fifth grade I started connecting the two things, theater and playing piano. It’s a Sohmer upright piano, very 1960s looking. It was just like, “You’re a child and you have to take piano lessons.” My grandpa loved music and loved the arts but had no real talent for it. MTT Were the piano lessons something you initiated? This theater stuff was happening in one part of my life, and in another part I was taking piano lessons, just because my family had a piano. I was this kid who knew everything about these shows, and I wanted to be a writer. I was in fifth grade talking about Miss Saigon and Claude Michel Schönberg. As soon as I wrapped my brain around the fact that people actually wrote these shows, I just decided that’s what I wanted to do-around elementary school age. It was like an Andrew Lloyd Webber to Stephen Sondheim switch that went off. I started reading about writers in particular. I went through the Cats phase and the Phantom of the Opera phase, and then I was really interested in other shows. Then I got really into seeing every musical that came out, and the more I did that the more I got bitten by the bug. The more I saw musicals, the more I became musical theater literate. I loved being around people who were good at it, like other kids who were good singers or actors. I couldn’t sing and I was very shy, but I did it because I loved being around it so much. So I would do musical theater summer camps and I would perform, but I was always terrible. When you’re a kid of a certain age, specifically where I’m from, the way to participate in theater is to be in it. MTT Was there also an impulse to participate? It immediately gave me a love for musical theater. That was the first musical I saw, and it was the most life-changing moment. I saw a commercial for it and my dad took me on September 27th, 1987 for my 6th birthday. I loved it and the original production was still playing at the Orpheum theater Off-Broadway.
JOE ALL THE THINGS INTERVIEW MOVIE
When I was six the Little Shop of Horrors movie came out. So The Muppets were probably my first exposure to any kind of theater and music hybrid. When I was little, I loved The Muppets a lot. MTT Were musicals something you uniquely began looking forward to? Were there any shows that really gobsmacked you? I was in the city constantly and it always felt like home to me. I also have an aunt who loved theater and brought me to shows all the time. My grandparents loved the city and felt very comfortable there (much more so than my actual parents) they would bring me into the city all the time. Parents and kids all stay within 10-20 minutes of each other their whole lives. My mom grew up in a house with her parents and her grandmother lived on the second floor, and so did her aunts and great aunts. They all lived in an apartment house together and when it split up they all went to Long Island. JI Yeah, we’re Italian folk, so when came from Italy they moved to Brooklyn and it was that classic tale. MTT Are you a pretty tightly-knit family? Do you all stay in the same area? There are a few cops, you know, that larger Long Island Italian Catholic contingent. A lot of my extended family is in teaching-that’s like the family business. My mom was a school teacher when I was a kid and now she’s a superintendent. JI I am from Long Island, from a town called Garden City in Nassau County. This feature originally appeared in Musical Theater Today, Volume 3 2019.